Thursday, April 24, 2008

Google AJAX APIs available from outside of the browser

This is very exciting, as it now allows you the developer to access not only Google Web Search results, but also query video, images, news, local, and other search functions. Also, this covers the AJAX Feed API which means you can get access to feeds in a normalized manner, and the new AJAX Language API to do translations and language detection.

If you step back, you can see this as a Google REST API, and some of you have wondered how it compares to the SOAP API.

I got to go to the horses mouth, Mark Lucovsky (team lead for the AJAX APIs), to discuss what this new access point is all about, and you may be a little surprised with the content.

We discuss the fact that this has actually been running for quite some time, but we now have clarified it as an official end point for your usage. This also means that it has thorough documentation, which was important as Mark talks about how some people have been using the API incorrectly.

Mark clarifies the terms of use, and you come out of this in the knowledge that his team has been attacking very different problems to the original SOAP API team. He has been ruthlessly practical, as you will understand as he talks about the problems his team are solving, and the breadth of sites that are using these APIs, including some very big names.

Enough of me talking, let's listen to Mark:

Hear more from Mark on the AJAX APIs, Vadim on accessing the APIs outside of AJAX, and Derek on advanced development using AJAX Apis at Google I/O.